Hello everyone
So I’m a newbie when it comes to drivers and package management, I’ve had installed nvidia drivers before and it used to work flawlessly. Today I ran full system upgrade (sudo pacman -Syu) after which I’ve noticed laggy graphics - for example youtube videos became very choppy. Also, I’ve noticed that picom has failed to run (I use dwm + picom). When I try to run it manually, it errors:
~ > picom
pci id for fd 8: 10de:1c03, driver (null)
pci id for fd 9: 10de:1c03, driver (null)
pci id for fd 10: 10de:1c03, driver (null)
glx: failed to create dri3 screen
failed to load driver: nvidia-drm
[ 11/04/2025 02:12:24.534 glx_init ERROR ] Failed to enable vsync.
pci id for fd 14: 10de:1c03, driver (null)
pci id for fd 15: 10de:1c03, driver (null)
pci id for fd 16: 10de:1c03, driver (null)
glx: failed to create dri3 screen
failed to load driver: nvidia-drm
zsh: segmentation fault (core dumped) picom
Here is some info:
~ > uname -a
Linux artyshan 6.17.7-arch1-1 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Sun, 02 Nov 2025 17:27:22 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux
I first tried reinstalling them manually with sudo pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils lib32-nvidia-utils but it didnt work, then I installed nvidia-inst and tried installing with nvidia-inst and nvidia-inst –-open, both of which didn’t help also.
Out of curiosity… have you tried rolling back to a driver that worked ?
Are you sure it’s the nvidia drivers that got borked ? Have you checked what packages you updated ? Maybe there is something else causing this, because from the output you posted it looks okay.
I would try running an X11 session with these drivers too, just to check if you have the same issues there.
Ok so I’ve checked the previous versions of nvidia, nvidia-utils, lib32-nvidia-utils from pacman log and reinstalled them from the pacman cache. The system then booted into very low resolution and I could not even launch any application, so I assume it’s a fail. Reverted it back to the newest versions, the problem described in my original post remains.
Now I looked into journalctl from the current boot (with the newest drivers) and it looks like nvidia-drm has been loaded properly
Nov 04 22:32:16 artyshan kernel: [drm] Initialized nvidia-drm 0.0.0 for 0000:01:00.0 on minor 1
but picom still throws
failed to load driver: nvidia-drm
I would try running an X11 session with these drivers too, just to check if you have the same issues there.
now that I think about it… I’ve noticed that anytime something more “complicated” happens on the screen, like playing a video or launching a new window, my CPU fan revs a bit, which I haven’t noticed earlier. Could it be that the discrete card is just unused now for some reason, and the CPU usage corresponds to the integrated GPU handling everything?
Update: I’ve installed envycontrol and set the mode to nvidia, but nothing changed
Update2: I’ve checked the usage with nvidia-smi and according to it, the only processes using the Nvidia card are Xorg and wezterm. Memory usage sits at almost nothing, despite launching a webgl stress test in the browser.
Update3: I launched a session on Plasma on wayland, and it seems to be working fine (I originally installed EndeavourOS with Plasma). So it might be an issue with my crappy setup, not with drivers.